One of the smartest, most insightful books I’ve ever read about the Web is The Cluetrain Manifesto. This book, subtitled The End of Business As Usual, was written by a group of Web pioneers way back in 2000, but it is still as fresh and smart today as it was when I first read it seven years ago. That’s a small miracle in the digital age, because most books about the Web written more than a year or two ago are now irrelevant or just plain wrong. The Cluetrain Manifesto is not only still vital, but just about everything predicted…
When I’m facing a challenge in my career I look for guidance from a higher authority.
Some read the bible, some read Ogilvy on Advertising and some read the iChing. I read the iSally. That’s when I open to a random page from Radical Careering, Sally Hogshead’s wonderfully inspiring and insightful book about careers, and see what wisdom she has for me. Here are a few choice nuggets I’ve read recently:
Worry less, do more. You only get a finite number of thoughts, choose wisely.
Never surrender to circumstances. There’s always another path to discover or create.
…most days, success is about wrestling failure…
His name is Bob Thacker and he’s the guy who tirelessly worked to transform Target from a little known discount store in Minnesota, to the much loved retailer it is today.
Now he’s working just as hard for OfficeMax and, given how smart a client he is, I have no doubt he’ll do just what he set out to do.
Why’s Bob a dream client? Because he understands that:
Bob has gotten off to a pretty great start for OfficeMax. So…
For a business built on creativity, agency thinking can be pretty uncreative; we staff up when we win business and staff down when we lose it. Besides being an incredibly demoralizing process for everyone, this crazy job rollercoaster runs completely counter to the challenge of finding, hiring and nurturing creative talent.
I recently read about an agency in Atlanta called the SuperGroup who came up with a much better — and much more creative — solution to layoffs. Instead of letting people go when business is slow, they encourage their creatives to pursue their own creative endeavors. Employees were told that as…
Ever wondered where those curiously strong mints got their name? Or that certain malternative? The stories behind those popular product names and a lot more can be found in Evan Morris’s wonderfully entertaining book From Altoids to Zima.
Evan takes you behind the scenes to reveal the thinking — or sometimes lack of thinking — that went into naming each product. Among the many interesting facts, you’ll find out what the Ms in M&Ms stand for; if Scotch tape was invented in Scotland; and why a cereal that contains neither grapes nor nuts is called Grape Nuts.
The story of each product…
You have probably heard about the dancing guy phenomena by now. His name is Matt Harding and he’s a regular fella who is happily dancing his way around the world. Literally. In his latest video on YouTube called, simply, Dancing, he is seen strutting his stuff in 69 different locations around the world, in some pretty amazing places like Tonga and Timbuktu.
Matt, truth be told, is not one of the world’s great dancers. He does this kind of frenetic jig that looks like step aerobics on Red Bull. But his dancing isn’t what makes the videos so appealing. It’s the sheer…
There’s an ad I’ve been seeing lately that’s built on a truly repulsive image. I’m not going to say who it’s for — because I know that many a bad ad started with a good idea — but I wish the agency and the client had stopped to consider how the image would be seen by the viewer.
Adding insult to injury, the copy is as off-putting as the picture: saying essentially that people who didn’t use their services were dumb. The most amazing thing is that the ad was for a very worthwhile service, one that a lot of people…
I was writing a presentation deck yesterday and I used the C Word. Actually, I used it a lot. Look…I know better…but it has become so automatic to call people Consumers that I just did it.
The funny thing is that when I don’t use the word in a presentation and use people instead, it actually looks like I’m forgetting that this is about advertising. So I try to define what kind of people we’re talking about, based on why they use, or would use, the product. They may be true believers, fun fanatics, or truth seekers. Whatever their reasons are,…
It’s an odd phenomena, but the more I write, the harder it gets. It’s not that the words don’t come, it’s that they come out the same.
While some repetition is expected — because advertising, like any kind of writing, has its own set language — too much of the same thing means your writing becomes dull and ignorable.
I read a lot of advertising books in search of good copy, like Luke Sullivan’s Hey Whipple Squeeze This, and I regularly peruse the advertising annuals, but I also read a lot of other kinds of writing to keep myself from falling into…
The animal at the top of this post is called a Fisher, and up until I read an article in the New York Times about him — where he was described as a ratty looking creature with fangs and claws that was in the habit of gnawing on the face of house pets — I had never heard of him.
So what does this mangy little guy have to do with advertising? Well, he’s an idea, and for me, he’s a pretty sticky one. Because he’s something that I had no awareness of at all until I read about, and now am…
By definition, I am a copywriter, which means that I’m supposed to hold the written word above all, particularly when I’m working with an art director! By dictate, I should secretly feel that design is just a way to pretty up an ad and frame my perfect words perfectly. Well, this might get me kicked out of the copywriter’s club but not only do I not feel that way, I’m also jealous of designers.
I’m envious of how design communications on such a pure level. Words take a more active, intellectual engagement, while design communicates effortlessly. With the
right colors, shapes and…
Ask any art director the single thing that has made their job easier in the last few years and they will probably say the computer first, and stock photography second.
In my opinion, both have made the job harder.
Computers have drastically shortened the perceived amount of time needed to create an ad, and stock photography has drastically altered the perception that ads need original images. Those are two pretty big misconceptions.
With time in short supply, and stock so plentiful, most projects look like this: start the job the day it’s due, read the headline that has already been written, search some…
It’s not Ogilvy on Advertising.
It’s a novel!
Sure, David Ogilvy wrote a great book about advertising. So did Bob Levinson and Peter Mayle. But the absolute best book ever written about advertising is the novel e. by Matt Beaumont.
A novel you say? How can that be better than a classic written by one of the masters of advertising?
Easy. Because e. shows what it’s like to really work in the rollicking and often surreal world of advertising.
The novel, told completely in email form, is about a pitch for the Coke account by London agency Miller Shanks. Through a blizzard of emails, Beaumont captures…
Mad Men, in case you haven’t seen it, is an original series that started last year on AMC, about a New York City advertising agency, set in 1960.
The first season was fantastic: great writing, acting and art direction. And for those of us in the business, it’s also a journey back in time to an era where going to work at an ad agency, for men, meant wearing a suit (even creatives!), smoking a pipe and drinking the proverbial three martini lunch.
For women, it mostly meant being chased around the office by suit wearing, pipe smoking, drunken letches, but that’s…
His name is Keith Johnson and he has made a Muffin Car: a cupcake-shaped runabout, which conceals a tiny electric all-terrain vehicle complete with handlebars from a Hello Kitty bicycle. You could think of Keith as a lone eccentric, toiling away in his garage, fueled by butter cream, but you’d be wrong. He’s actually one of a dozen or so people who make and race muffin cars.
And they are not alone. In fact, there are thousands of people who are now making things again. Curious, new things, with a real sense of wonder to them. These modern day inventors —…
I spend a ridiculous amount of time reading, which I justify to myself (and my family) by saying that the more I read, the better writer I’ll be.
Recently, I came across two writers who create their writing by rearranging or subtracting words from what they’ve read. I know this sounds kind of post-deconstructionist, but the resulting new works are absolutely unique.
First, there’s Newspaper Blackout Poems from the wonderfully named Austin Kleon. He is a writer, cartoonist and designer who does pretty much what the name implies — he writes his poems by removing words from newspaper articles. The results are sparse,…
Attend any ad agency meeting and one thing you can be sure of is that the buzzwords will be flying: Out of the Box, Let’s Take This Offline, New Paradigm, Low Hanging Fruit, A (fill in your own big number) Foot View, and Dog & Pony Show, just to name a few. It seems that these words are hardwired into the meeting lexicon.
This practice is so widespread that Buzzword Bingo games have sprung up like mushrooms on the web, and IBM even has a commercial based on the idea, which, I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess, was…
A little while ago I found a really amazing speech called The Brief for the Sistine Chapel on the English brand planning site www.accountplanning.net.
Written by Damian O’Malley, who is now the Executive Planning Director for McCann Europe, the speech illustrated just how important a brief is to the creative process.
In it, Damian imagines the various briefs that Pope Julius II, or the Pope’s account man, Cardinal Alidosi may have given Michelangelo. Each is analyzed for its effectiveness and potential outcome, and the article ends with the kind of brief that has the power to inspire a Michelangelo — or a…
